Telepathy 传心术 is a collection of essays of art in neoliberalism by Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas. The hyper-competition of neoliberalism is a construction that is sold as a fact of nature, purely a matter of biology, genetics, basic psychology, and particle physics, etc. The priests of advanced neoliberal capitalism credit all human advancements to competition.
Fields such as art, science, and education are antithetical to the goals of neoliberal quantification, gamification, and resulting private appropriation of everything. However, even these fields are forced to comply and compete, to great detriment of the independent goals of these fields, through coerced competition for resources via constant demands for performance metrics. For most of us it is impossible to step outside the legislated competitions of neoliberalism and so individuals must be well adjusted within the system, enabled by realist-conformist postures.
The rhetoric of competition has been cleverly transferred to a general system of governance, and forms relations between people, and between people and their professions. In this way, competition serves both as a discourse of legitimation, and as legal framework of extreme control. It takes armies of technocrats working tirelessly, endlessly, in order to enforce the myth of competition and thus hardly “natural” in the way it is marketed.
Copy-editing: Amanda Hurtado
Design: Rafaela Dražić